Hands-On With Amazon’s Fire TV, the Tiny Console That Could Transform Gaming

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

We have a bit of a device problem at home. If it plays games and is still on the market, there’s probably one hooked up to our TV right now. There’s the Comcast box, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, the last-gen consoles, a PC, a Wii U, a Wii and even an Ouya all wrapped tight in a Gordian knot of cabling. Legends tell of a cable modem buried somewhere in there.

In other words, we are not, currently, the target market for an Amazon Fire TV.

Whatever the function of Amazon’s new set-top box, we’ve already got multiple devices that can handle it. But is Amazon going after us? Of course not; it’s looking to make Fire TV the one box of choice for the sort of family who only wants one.

For now, that is. Fire TV is the thin edge of the wedge. If Amazon eventually wants its name to be as synonymous with videogames as Sony’s or Microsoft’s, this is one possible way in. The only substantial differences between Fire TV and Xbox One are that one of them is less powerful and doesn’t have a disc slot. Those seem like, and could be, weaknesses. They could just as easily be strengths.

As I mentioned when Amazon announced and then immediately released Fire TV last week, Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter immediately dismissed Fire TV as a credible gaming machine under the assumption that no one would want to “play mobile games on their TVs.” This seems to me a distinction without a difference; put a mobile game on a TV and it’s not a mobile game anymore.

I noticed this when I fired up Crazy Taxi, which seems to have been rather unceremoniously ported over from the Kindle tablet. It doesn’t feel like a mobile game, although perhaps that’s also owing to its origins as an arcade and Sega Dreamcast game from 1999. Crazy Taxi has not aged well, but it was nice to relive some of the agonizing hours I spent trying to master it.

The Fire Game Controller, sold separately for $40, it is at least better than a Dreamcast controller. Okay, okay, it’s better than that; it has a functional if derivative design and I especially like the solid feel of the analog joysticks. The D-pad is not great; it sticks a little and requires too much force. But Fire TV isn’t married to this controller; Amazon could always redesign or tweak it, or you could do what I did and plug a wired Xbox 360 controller into the USB slot on the back of the Fire TV.

I was a little disappointed to find that Crazy Taxi didn’t let me customize the controller layout — I wanted to move the car’s accelerator from the right bumper to the right trigger, where it would have been much more comfortable. But no.

Another game that was initially appealing but turned out to be disappointingly unpolished was Double Dragon Trilogy, a collection of the three classic arcade beat-em-up games. How could this go wrong? Well, the developer strangely decided to cut out the original games’ heads-up displays and attract modes, replacing them with ugly Arial fonts and nothing, respectively. So they’re not the games you remember but weird half-complete versions of them.

Additionally, plugging the aforementioned Xbox 360 controller into the Fire TV didn’t give us the two-player mode we were hoping for. The controller worked, but both of them controlled the single onscreen player. So that was a bummer too.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

If you don’t buy the Controller, you can play some games with the included remote control. I wish they’d stealthily designed it like the Wii Remote, allowing you to turn it sideways and use it like an old-school gamepad. But they didn’t. I guess a developer technically could do this, but it would be awkward given the positioning of the buttons.

So far, things were looking a little disappointing — maybe Fire TV would just be the home of half-hearted mobile ports? But then we decided to try Fibbage, a new game from the makers of the long-running humorous trivia game You Don’t Know Jack. Currently, it’s exclusive to Fire TV.

Hosted by that game’s fictional emcee Cookie Masterson, Fibbage is something like the board game Balderdash — you’re given a wacky trivia fact with the key word obscured, and then everyone has to come up with a good lie that fits the blank. Everyone then sees all the answers and votes; you win points if others vote for your lie or if you guess the truth.

The gimmick is that you don’t use the Fire TV’s remote control or the game controller to play this — everyone just pulls out their phones, tablets, computers, anything that has a web browser, and goes to fibbage.com. There, you enter in the unique room code that’s displayed on your TV screen, and instantly you’re all playing together, up to 8 of you.

Fibbage was lots of fun. And the same open philosophy that allows developers to release half-assed ports also allows exciting new ideas like this. (Would something that has players log in via a website in this manner even be allowed on traditional consoles? I’m not sure.)

Fun, exclusive first-party content isn’t strictly necessary to become a gaming powerhouse (see: iPhone), but it’s highly recommended. Amazon is all over this with its formation of Amazon Game Studios. The fact that Kim Swift (Portal) and Clint Hocking (Far Cry 2) are now on the team has been well-reported. At a brief meeting with Amazon earlier this week I met Ian Vogel, senior designer on games like Age of Empires Online and BioShock, and now a game designer for Amazon Game Studios.

Having game developers create games as the Fire TV hardware was being created, said Amazon Games VP Michael Frazzini, was important, since the hardware was tweaked based on the game designers’ feedback. One such change, he said, was bumping Fire TV’s RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB. That’s a quarter of what’s in PlayStation 4 and Xbox One — but four times the amount in Xbox 360.

RAM alone, of course, is not the only factor in determining the performance of a piece of gaming hardware. But there’s a lot to be said for what kind of results designers can wring out of “obsolete” hardware if they’re motivated enough to do it.

This week, we learned that the Xbox 360 version of Titanfall, which was downscaled to the lower-powered 360 from the next-gen Xbox One game released last month, seems to have been pulled off with stunning fidelity. It’s taken a slight hit to graphical fidelity, but it’s still Titanfall. On a platform released in 2005. With 512 MB of RAM.

It might take a while before tiny boxes like Fire TV surpass the powerful next-gen game consoles. But how long before they can push graphics equivalent to the 360 and PS3? And might that not be Good Enough for even some hardcore gamers, at $100? Other developers might not be sufficiently motivated to squeeze the most performance out of Fire TV, but that’s surely one of the reasons Amazon is building a home team that does nothing but.

And even then, we with every device imaginable piled around our televisions aren’t being courted here. It’s everyone who wouldn’t otherwise buy a console but would, if they were to turn on their TV and see a tab marked “Games” on the Fire TV menu, scroll down to see what those might be. Or any kid who obsessively plays Minecraft on a Kindle tablet and now finds that they can play on the TV for no extra money since they already own the software.

Just like iPhone did to the dedicated handheld gaming market, Fire TV (or something like it) could seriously disrupt consoles over the next generation. out of the box this week, it’s not exactly setting the world on fire immediately. But if you look closely, you can see where the tiny sparks might start.